1️⃣ The Weekly Play
The Death of Cold Outbound Without Content Support
Five years ago, sending 1,000 cold emails could book you 30-40 calls. Today, youʼd be lucky to get five. Today itʼs noise. Replies are low, inbox fatigue is high, and prospects tune it out.
Hereʼs why it no longer works on its own:
Trust has shifted upstream. Buyers complete over half of their journey before responding to sales. That means the real competition happens before you ever show up in their inbox.
Attention is scarce. Decision-makers get hundreds of emails a day, and every one of them promises results. Only the familiar break through.
Cold outreach is now pattern-recognizable. People know what a sequence looks like and delete it.
The fix isnʼt to abandon outbound; itʼs to feed it better inputs.
So whatʼs the play?
Build authority first. Publish something useful that your audience actually saves or shares. It can be a case study, customer quote, or even a how-we- did-it post.
Warm the ecosystem. Post that content across your owned channels: website, LinkedIn, newsletter. Tag customers, partners, or suppliers who relate.
Follow up fast. Within 72 hours, reach out to the people who engaged with or viewed that content. Your email isnʼt cold anymore; itʼs contextual.
SMB operators who do this well see a 3-4x increase in outbound reply rates because the message now carries proof and purpose.
If youʼre pushing cold outreach before youʼve invested in narratives and authority, youʼre burning touchpoints. Let content earn you proximity first. Then your outbound lands with context, not as a shot in the dark.
2️⃣ This Week in Growth
How Notion Turned Templates Into a Growth Engine
Notion didnʼt just market a product. They built a system where users marketed it for them.
Its growth came from one deceptively simple idea: make the customer the marketer.
Hereʼs how the flywheel worked:
Users could create any workflow they wanted and duplicate it with one click.
They shared templates across Twitter, Reddit, Indie Hackers, Gumroad, and blogs. Each template solved a real problem, acted as an onboarding demo, and pulled new users into the product.
The official Notion Template Gallery amplified this loop. It gave people a hub to browse, discover, and publish new use cases every day. That kept the product fresh and created infinite new ways to market the same tool.
Each new template became:
A free demo for new users.
An SEO landing page bringing organic traffic.
A retention loop for existing users who kept finding new use cases.
You might not sell software, but you can still build your own version of a “template gallery.ˮ
When you document how customers win with you, you create repeatable, evergreen marketing assets that keep selling even when youʼre asleep.
3️⃣ Owned Intel
3 Headlines You Shouldn’t Miss
Ahrefs launched a public dashboard tracking referral traffic from ChatGPT vs Google, letting you see AI search as a measurable channel.
A peer-reviewed study found that LLMs often prefer AI-written content over human text when choosing between the two.
Beehiivʼs blog argues that X subscriptions generate more revenue than CreatorRevenue Sharing under current algorithm changes.
4️⃣ The Scroll Stopper
Calendly Is Turning Into a Lead Machine
Content Hurricane shows how Calendly has evolved from a scheduling tool into a lead generation engine. By embedding it in the right funnel, companies qualify prospects before the meeting even starts.
Visitors can self-select meeting types - discovery, demo, consult, which acts as an automatic filter. And because Calendly integrates directly with CRMs, those leads flow into the sales stack without friction.
5️⃣ Metric Benchmark
Closing Note
Outbound on its own is fading. Templates, content flows, and smart funnels like Calendly are showing us the alternative. Let value travel first, then let sales follow. The brands that are winning right now are the ones treating owned channels as the growth engine.
This week, pick one asset you already own - a template, a blog post, even a case study, and run it through your funnel. Add a simple “book a callˮ link or embed it directly into Calendly. The shift is small, but the signal youʼll send is big.
See you next week with more ways to grow by owning, not renting.
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